IMAGe research projects

Spatial Distributions of Precipitation Events from Regional Climate Models

Nathan Lenssen

A summer intership project June-August 2010 mentored by Doug Nychka

NCAR has an active research program in the analysis of large numerical simulations of the climate over North America. What is unique about these simulations is their high resolution (50 km) which approaches the scale needed to assess local effects of climate change. The goal of this research is to quantify the validity of such models when compared to observed data. A simple statistic, akin to the spatial cumulative distribution function, is used to summarize different climate models' ability to localize precipitation events.

Report | Presentation

(Left) Simulated 3 hour precipitation (mm/hr) of the Candian Regional climate model from the North American Regional Climate Change Program (NARCCAP). (Right) The proportion of grid cells are are below a specific level of precipitation.